A natural state

Nearly five millennia old, Pakistan is the latest name of the Indus Valley Civilisation

That Pakistan is an “unnatural” state and India is “natural” is an assertion made by Pakistanis and foreigners alike with little knowledge of the history of the area.

To the contrary, Pakistan is natural because it exists right on the millennia-old Indus Valley Civilisation that extends from eastern Balochistan, through Sindh where the central city was Mohenjo-Daro, undivided Punjab up to the outskirts of Delhi in which Harappa, the oldest known city in history existed some 8,000 years ago, to Gandhara in the British crafted North West Frontier Province (NWFP) now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), up to the fabled Silk Route that enriched the northern part of the Indus Valley Civilisation and is the incubator of Buddhism attracting not just traders but also pilgrims from China, Mongolia, Persia, Afghanistan and the central Asian Republics. In fact, local legend has it, that Chinese pilgrims named the river near Gujrat, Punjab, ‘Chen’, meaning ‘beautiful’. Later, the Persian word for water, ‘Aab’, was added to it to make it ‘Chenab’ or ‘Beautiful Water’.

Later the British broke large parts of the Punjab and inserted them into NWFP to make it ‘viable’ and break Punjab’s power that the wise Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the only man ever to defeat the Pashtuns, had demonstrated. Today, the Punjab stands divided into five, with two parts in Pakistan and three in India thanks to the age-old divide and rule policy, just like this policy is being used today to divide Muslims by exploiting their sectarian rifts and lay traps that they stupidly fall into, Muslims killing Muslims, many more than non-Muslims, committing barbarous un-Islamic acts and waging war against God.

‘State’ as we know it today is a modern, man-made European concept that requires delineated boundaries on maps and on the ground, citizenship acts, passports, visas… Even the words ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ hark back to natural city states of antiquity, whereas modern day states comprise many cities whose citizens belong to many different nations and ethnic, linguistic and religious groups – the United Kingdom comprises the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh nations, for example. Thus ‘statehood’ rather than ‘citizenship’ would be more accurate. The USA is unique in this sense since though it comprises many nations, none of them can yet claim any part of it as their soil, its original inhabitants of mongoloid descent having been ethnically cleansed by white trespasser occupiers.

When Man’s innate hegemony drive caused advanced city-states to occupy lands of other states and nations they became empires. In some cases, like Athens and to a certain extent Rome, educated empires became civilisations as well, which tells us that civilisations like the Indus Valley and Athens comprised many states too. Athenian and earlier Indus Valley philosophers crafted political and civic ideologies while their priestly classes crafted religions with gods with supernatural powers, but basically all these were drivers of the hegemony quest for incremental economic gain and to cast the stamp of their civilisations on their empires. Athenian civilisation and philosophy became the embryo of latter day European states and civilisations, ideologies and statecraft, and whose influence continues to this day.

When Man’s innate hegemony drive caused advanced city-states to occupy lands of other states and nations they became empires

The great Mongol warrior Temüjin, better known as Chingez or ‘Genghis’ Khan, whose battle strategies are studied by armies to this day, is also a bigger influence on modern European civilisation than most people realise. Similarly, the armies of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, many of whom settled and intermarried in Pakhtun areas, influenced the ways, traditions, culture, apparel (shalwar-kameez) and cuisine (bland salted sheep) of the Pathans. Their knowledge of engineering and metallurgy informed the cottage arms industry of the Pathans and the cottage engineering industries of the Gujranwala-Lahore-Sialkot triangle in Pakistani Punjab.

Similarly, the Indus valley has at different times comprised many states and nations under different rulers naturally woven together in a political, economic, cultural and priestly fabric of civilisation constantly enriched and enhanced by outside influences, by its climate, its rivers, particularly the Indus.

Nations and countries are natural. A ‘nation’ comprises groups, tribes or clans of people with certain commonalities, like language, culture, cuisine, apparel, expletives, values, customs, rituals and traditions as part of a code of life. Priestly religions were governors of human behaviour too: thus a confluence of philosophers, astrologers, soothsayers and priests kept a small elite in power and privilege as is still does to this day. Professions of church-state notwithstanding, religion, like the Evangelical, Judaism and Zionist have a powerful influence on the policies of the US deep state, as do the Church of England and the Vatican on secular life.

A ‘country’ is the land on which a ‘nation’ lives that it calls its soil. If an alien conquers it and imposes his hegemony, he is called an occupier, interloper, trespasser unless the conqueror-occupier settles that land, as the European whites did the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and parts of South Africa and Zimbabwe in recent times and much earlier hordes of Aryans from the Caucuses, the steppes of Russia, central Asia and Mongolia did India and other places east and west.

Even earlier, natural land migrations caused mongoloid peoples, all of whom originated from the Malay peninsula, to cross into north and south America when there was a land bridge from western Russia into Alaska before the sea overpowered the land and created the Bering Straits. The migrants came to be variously called ‘Eskimos’ or ‘politically correctly’ Inuit, ‘Red Indians’ or ‘politically correctly’ Native Americans, Inca and Maya in South America and, generally, ‘Indians’ because old Christopher Columbus thought that he had landed in India. The Spanish and Portuguese conquered parts of South and Central America, killed or drove the native ‘Indians’ into the forests, and settled the lands.

Arabs and the British captured Africans, the latter selling them as slaves in America while the British and French used Africans and Indians (particularly from the state of Bihar) as bonded labourers (as in ‘bonds’ of slavery) in the Caribbean or West Indies (India again) who also settled there and comprise the majority of the population. African slaves were first called ‘Negros’ and now ‘politically correctly’ ‘African-Americans’, as if change of name can wipe out the history of slavery.

A ‘nation’ comprises groups, tribes or clans of people with certain commonalities, like language, culture, cuisine, apparel, expletives, values, customs, rituals and traditions as part of a code of life

Go to the beginning. Some 270 million years ago, Earth was one supercontinent landmass called ‘Pangaea’ or ‘Pangea’ covering one-third of the planet’s surface. It started breaking apart some 200 million years ago and much later, when humanoids walked the earth, part of Africa drifted away carrying its Negroid inhabitants with it and banged into Eurasia giving rise to the Himalayan, Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain ranges, and parts southwards to make Australia and New Zealand with their Aboriginal and Maori populations. The people that the breakaway landmass carried with it to what came to be known as India are called Dravidians who practice the oldest living religion in the world, Hinduism, which is more a philosophy of creation and life with its myriad gods and deities. Hinduism is most pristine in south India where the Dravidians were pushed down by conquering Aryan hordes who made their own additions to the religion, as happened in every other religion afterwards.

The last and lingering influences on the Indian subcontinent were the Muslim and later British conquests. Muslims ruled India for a thousand years, bringing with them Mongols and central Asians, Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Turks and Africans as slaves in Balochistan and Sindh, along with their languages, cuisine, culture, religion, dress, ways of life, laws, militarism and revenue systems. The British brought the English language which still is one of the official languages, imposed their laws, political, educational and legal systems, and modernity too, particularly railways, dams, canals and other infrastructure. Most importantly, the British manufactured a class of Indians as intermediaries between themselves and the natives that was English in every respect except for the colour of their skins. Both changed the character and personality of India forever, to such an extent that the policies of both India and Pakistan are made with an eye on the other in a sort of unhealthy competition and has become part of the great global game of multi-dimensional hegemonic chess. The British have still not got over their Raj nor reconciled themselves to the loss of the jewel in their crown.

Since I have drifted it bears repetition that Pakistan is a natural state while India as constituted today is a forced British amalgamation of the civilisations and states that existed on the Gangetic and Brahmaputra basins and the civilisation to the south with its pristine Hinduism. Modern India is a British colonial hangover. Because it is unnatural is precisely why India broke in 1947 when Pakistan came into being as a continuum of the Indus Valley Civilisation on the Indus Basin, the Indus River being the main water artery or aorta of the Indus valley with its many tributaries. Had the Indian subcontinent been one natural state it wouldn’t be broken in three parts today. The India that remained was a leftover of the artificial state that the British had created. I would go so far as to say that the original Pakistan comprising East Pakistan that is now Bangladesh was an unnatural state at its inception, because Bangladesh belongs to the Brahmaputra civilisation (with Gangetic civilisation influence) while today’s Pakistan belongs to the Indus Valley Civilisation and is its latest name. Between them lies India that belongs to the civilisations of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers with all their tributaries and distributaries in the north while the civilisation of southern India is a fourth continuity and has little in common with the rest of India or with Pakistan and Bangladesh. The languages spoken in all these basins are different too.

I would also go so far as to say that the Indian subcontinent is gradually evolving back to what it used to be before the British advent, a sort of loose confederation in modern parlance of many states made along linguistic lines that were part of different Indian subcontinent civilisations.